​Here is an interesting fact I found in researching Hermes Trismegistus and his pyramids of wisdom. An old Arabic text by Ibn Wahshiyya called Kitab Shawq al-Mustaham (Ancient Alphabets) (c. 863-930 CE), a book purporting to decipher the hieroglyphs of Egypt, makes reference to a creature named Bahumed, which some have claimed to be the same as Baphomet, the demon allegedly worshiped by the Knights Templar. According to Washiyya, Bahumed was “the most sublime secret” and “the secret of secrets,” “the beginning and return of everything.” The secret of Bahumed, he said, was known to the Hermetic occultists, and it was the secret of the hieroglyphs, encoded in inscriptions which unlock secret magic so powerful that none but the Hermetic followers know of it. This secret knowledge was attributed to Hermes, who was Enoch and Idris, and to his ancestors Seth and Adam, as was typical in Islamic lore. 

​On Monday L. A. Marzulli weighed in on last week’s Ancient Aliens, in which an elongated skull allegedly from pre-Contact Peru was said to contain DNA that most closely matched a Scottish person. Marzulli, who has chosen to match Ancient Aliens’ turn toward creationism with an embrace of the popular History Channel show, crowed that these results were consistent with his own DNA test on a different skull last year that found European and Middle Eastern DNA in the skull. He also said that the two skulls both show a lack of a sagittal suture, making them potential Nephilim corpses. However, Marzulli claims that all of this proves that the Nephilim emigrated from Israel after the Flood. He added, apropos of nothing, that Cahokia, the greatest Mississippian city, was not built by Native Americans but rather is thousands of years old, not hundreds, and was built by Nephilim using “Fallen Angel technology.”

Last year I investigated the secret origins of the so-called “Curse of the Pharaohs.” It is always disheartening to see a mystery one has solved turned into a zany romp on Ancient Aliens, but because this particular mystery is so close to my heart, tying in with projects to which I have devoted countless hours, I can’t help but feel particularly upset by the stupid, stupid, stupid bastardization of a very complicated story into the ridiculous claim that aliens were responsible for the curse.

​After Pres. Donald Trump called the rules of U.S. Congress “archaic” this week and said that they are a “bad thing for the country,” his chief of staff said that the Administration has “looked at” ways to limit or repeal the First Amendment. Fortunately, presidents can’t amend the Constitution, but it’s clear that Trump doesn’t know anything about history or the law. In an interview on Sirius XM radio yesterday, Trump praised Andrew Jackson, a slave-owning former president who oversaw the Trail of Tears and thought Native Americans killed off a lost white race, claiming that Jackson would have prevented the Civil War had he been in office when it broke out. Trump wrongly stated that Jackson was angered by the war when it broke out (he died 16 years before it started) and claimed that few investigate why the war erupted. “People don’t realize, you know, the Civil War, you think about it, why? People don’t ask that question,” Trump said. “But why was there the Civil War. Why would that one not have been worked out?” Trump’s startling historical ignorance—not to mention failure to grapple with 150 years of scholarly research into the war’s origins—is matched only by his implication that the president he most likens to himself, Jackson, could have “worked out” a deal to compromise on whether black people should be considered full human beings. We already knew that Trump gets his news from Fox News, but apparently he gets his history from the History Channel—paranoia, conspiracy, and racist dog-whistles.
 
Speaking of which…

​Today I’m going to try to finish my evaluation of Zena Halpern’s Templar Mission to Oak Island and Beyond, and you will forgive me if I summarize more than usual some of the sidetracks that aren’t directly relevant to the question of the Knights Templar in America. Before we begin, however, I need to address a couple of points that David Brody and Steve St. Clair, both friends of Halpern and active participants in her hunt for Templar treasure in the Catskills, made in comments on my blog.

​Yesterday I began my look at Zena Halpern’s Templar Mission to Oak Island. Today, for better or worse, I continue. To refresh your memory: We previously discussed the supposed mystery of a brass box with alchemical and astrological symbols that a man named William D. Jackson claimed to have stolen from Bannerman Island in New York in 1969, a mystery that Halpern learned about from an alleged secret agent named Dan Spartan of the (likely fictitious) Spartan Agency who fed her information through typewritten letters sent from false addresses.

​Regular readers will remember Zena Halpern, an octogenarian who claimed on The Curse of Oak Island to have access to copies of medieval maps that demonstrate what she believes to be evidence of a voyage by the Knights Templar to map Oak Island and other parts of North America. Halpern is ill with what her friends have described online as a very serious illness, though I have no knowledge of her current health status. Last week Halpern released her long-gestating project, The Templar Mission to Oak Island and Beyond: Search for Ancient Secrets: The Shocking Revelations of a 12th Century Manuscript. As you can tell from the multiple subtitles, the book has some problems with editing. It is self-published, and the rough, unfinished quality of the writing is at times distracting and sometimes infuriating when the author repeats the same thing several times in a row. It needed an editor.

​Yesterday, the publicists for the National Geographic Channel offered me the chance to interview Simcha Jacobovici and Richard Freund about their new documentary, Atlantis Rising, which will air on NatGeo on January 29. The two will be doing a series of interviews to promote the show, which will allege that a set of six Bronze Age stone anchors found on the Atlantic side of the Strait of Gibraltar is evidence of a wealthy maritime civilization that inspired Plato’s Atlantis. The documentary was produced with the help of James Cameron, who declined to make himself available for interviews. Jacobovici is the TV producer who famously alleged that Jesus did not die on the cross but was buried with his wife Mary Magdalene in Jerusalem’s Talpiot Tomb. Freund is the biblical archaeologist who previously “discovered” Atlantis in Spain in a 2011 NatGeo documentary widely criticized by archaeologists for false claims and for appropriating without proper credit discoveries others made.

​I hadn’t written much about this week’s episode of Curse of Oak Island, mostly because I find it hard to gin up much enthusiasm for watching construction equipment move earth. If I wanted to see that, I can watch it live at the dozens of construction sites around town. Plus, I was busy this week with more interesting things to do. Anyway, I eventually got around to taking a look at the episode, and it turns out that they had a crazy conspiracy this week, offered by another in the parade of know-nothing pseudo-experts who pretend to have vast insights that they can never quite back up.

​A few weeks ago, when Curse of Oak Island introduced the modern “copies” of allegedly medieval maps owned by researcher Zena Halpern, many viewers questioned the fact that the map shown on screen seemed to show accurate lines of longitude long before a reliable method for accurately calculating longitude had been discovered. While the most parsimonious explanation is that the Halpern map is a modern fake, former television personality Scott F. Wolter has instead argued that the maps prove that the Knights Templar (whom he suspects of creating them) were able to accurately measure longitude, despite accidentally proving that he is himself unfamiliar with how longitude is measured and reported.